


to hear your heart’s false start

by ag_sasami



Category: DCU - Comicverse, Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-09-27
Updated: 2011-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 02:13:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ag_sasami/pseuds/ag_sasami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim’s ability to disengage is the one defense Kon wishes he’d never learned. Or, that one where Tim runs away instead of becoming Red Robin after Bruce’s death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> An AU from the end of Battle for the Cowl forward.

Tim Wayne dies the day his adoptive father does. Tim Drake disappears two days later with a note that reads only: _Don’t try to follow me_.

Alvin Draper pays for a flight to San Francisco, leaves a tiny phone GPS broken under the heel of a passing stranger’s stiletto. Evan Harper buys a few train transfers down to Los Angeles and leaves two more passive trackers under the wheels of an Amtrak. Alexander Rice books a first class ticket to Beijing Capital Airport. Breathing in the polluted breeze of the city he is satisfied that even if Dick decides to track him that he’s made his point. The air almost makes him wish he’d just stayed stateside. Almost.

Bart calls him first, while he’s in the Forbidden City. He silences the phone but lets it ring through to a voicemail he deletes without listening. Kon calls, the first time, while he’s visiting Tiananmen Square. Tim deletes the voicemail like Bart’s. The second time he’s trying to visit the Imperial Gardens. This call he clicks the ignore button and Kon has the decency to not leave a message. The third time he calls, Tim throws his phone over the Great Wall and books a red-eye to Tokyo Narita. 

Japan has objectively better air and subjectively better food. By the time he tires of the over-bright lights, the crush and swell of people, the enormity of his loneliness has become a nuisance. He considers China again, remembers the food, remembers that Cass is in Hong Kong, and thinks it’s time to move on. Cass, he imagines, would talk some sense into him, and being sensible really is the last thing he wants right now. 

—-

Paris is a terrible cliché. But after three months in a sea of strangers, “cliché” makes him feel a little less like a stranger in his own skin. He wastes another month and a half in France, idle. He drinks good wine at his leisure. He learns to sleep during the night, except for those times he stays out until the sunrise in sweat-soaked clubs, watching, touching, interacting. Slowly Tim is shedding Gotham like some dead husk of himself.

—-

As a subtle acknowledgement to his growing restlessness he abandons France for Italy. His hate is immediate. Inexplicable. He doesn’t bother growing to like it.

—-

London had been a risk. Tim— _Robin_ —had allies in London, people who had the potential to be well-intentioned spies. But it had been just familiar enough on landing to quell his growing isolation without being too much like coming home.

Ten months between them and the thought of home still turns his stomach. Both of his fathers now dead and Dick’s betrayal like a sucker punch leaves the burn of bile at the back of his throat. Here, now, his flat above the coffee shop never smells like blood or motor oil and no one climbs through his window looking for surrogate absolution. The world feels set back on a proper tilt, the way it did stalking rooftops in sneakers, behind the lens of a camera.

Ten months and Tim is finally starting to settle into this new normal. Ten months when the carpet is pulled from under his feet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim’s ability to disengage is the one defense Kon wishes he’d never learned. Or, that one where Tim runs away instead of becoming Red Robin after Bruce’s death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An AU from the end of Battle for the Cowl forward.

Tim— _Alex_ —is seeing someone. He is dark hair and skin coppered from the sun. He works at a construction site and calls his job “dream building.” Muscles wrap heavy on his tall frame. His eyes are blue. Tim makes it a point not to read into the details. It was an accident, really, when it began. Stephan spilled his coffee at the pickup counter and offered to buy a new one. And then he offered to buy another coffee the following Tuesday. Then dinner on Friday night. It was easy.

It _is_ easy. There is no one here to answer to, no awkward explanations to make. He isn’t hiding another life, though the irony of that thought with his false name isn’t lost on him. Stephan smiles indulgently. He lets _Alex_ lie about how he’s never worked a day in his life as he runs a callused thumb carelessly across his forearm, over white lines and pink weals etched into his skin.

It is slow and uncomplicated. It is honest. Mostly. Within the bounds of a more flexible definition of _noun: honest_.

They are seated across from each other at a quaint little café. Warm afternoon light slots sideways onto Tim’s legs through the trees lining the walk. He chuckles, and he hasn’t looked so soft, at ease, in as long as Kon has known him. He would have lost a fortune on the wager that he had actually seen Tim without a mask before this moment. But there’s an easy, lopsided grin pulling up the corner of his mouth and Kon is looking at an unsettlingly familiar stranger. Beneath the table their ankles are crossed together.

This is the detail that will keep Kon awake on a rooftop for half the night.

Right now it is irrelevant to the bigger picture, swamped out with the acceleration of Tim’s heart. He’d forgotten that Tim’s bat senses tend to rival his own. Of course, he remembers when Tim’s eyes shift; his breath hitches; the soft smile on him tightens just so, and he is Kon’s Tim again, the one lost to him for months. Somehow it isn’t a comfort to know the race of Tim’s heart in this moment.

The man at Tim’s table says, “Alex?” like he can’t decide whether or not it is a question. His thumb across the back of Tim’s hand looks rough and comfortable. It takes a measure of restraint Tim would never have given Kon credit for not to punch this stranger in the teeth for all the familiarity in the gesture. That too is a detail he doesn’t dwell on in the moment. It just looks so presumptuous to think that it’s okay to just touch Tim so casually, and the ease with which Tim reacts just galls him that much more.

For ten months he has been trying to track Tim down with zero help from the other bats, who are, in a weird break from habit, respecting Tim’s desire for escape. Kon intends to respect it too, but only up to a point. That point being the one where Tim thinks he can disengage Kon from his life. Maybe it’s a little selfish, but Tim is his best friend and it feels like an obligation to keep him from just walking away. And maybe it’s something more than that. Again, Kon isn’t thinking about it. It isn’t as though he _expects_ Tim to just drop everything and come home, even if he _wants_ it to happen just like that; he’s just been a little like a ship without an anchor since Tim up and disappeared.

Thankfully, Tim is excusing himself from their meeting, mumbling apologies of feeling ill and bracing himself with shaking hands. He doesn’t look at Kon again—not since the peripheral shift of his eyes that left him looking so sick. But Kon follows him past buildings and through walls, senses latched to the humming bird beating against his ribs. He takes up a place on the roof above Tim flat, as unobtrusive as he can manage. Ears tuned into his pulse, Kon unwittingly memorizes the sound of Tim’s fear for the first time.

Below him, Tim rediscovers the shape of panic with his head against his door and arms listless against the cool wood of the entryway floor.

—-

Kon is a weight at his back, heavy, dragging him back to places he buried and left behind. Soft footfalls echo his steps just out of reach. A shadow sits vigil on his windowsill, cast down by moonlight on the roof.

In the days that follow Kon doesn’t approach, Tim notes. He hovers just out of reach, on the street and in shops and on his rooftop, but he never comes close enough to react. If this had been a few years prior he would have known why, could have teased apart Kon’s motives with uncanny accuracy. But now? He imagines the statement is meant to be clear: _whenever you’re ready, but I’m not backing off._ Somehow it’s still too much pressure and even with the uncertainty of Kon’s intentions. Tim just thinks Kon looks as uprooted, as bewildered, as he feels. Maybe he hasn’t any better an idea why he’s here than Tim does. And that sets something roiling in him, old and broken and uncomfortably aching.

For four days Tim stares through him like he’s a trick of the light. For four days he swallows down panic, sobbing like a child beneath the scald of the shower. It’s bending him too far to be tethered to the sense of everything he’s been running from. Everything smells like biofluids, like breathing in cloning chemicals. Bruce died and he wanted— _needed_ —to distance himself from the constant pull of hysteria, the ever present need to take back what was lost. There are supposed to be continents between himself and that sensation, because he lived in that delusion once and he’s too close to it again.

So Kon is on his roof and Tim waits to break from it, for his skin to feel stretched just too tight and his mind to ask that _one_ question too many. But he doesn’t break and he’s beginning to think he needs to when he wakes up on the fifth day alone and unwatched, profoundly unsettled. It isn’t the peace he expected, no freedom to relish. He looks over his shoulder and peeks down alleys like a man hunted.

It would have been better just to shatter, he supposes. And for the first time in nearly a year he sleeps with his window open to the humid night. In his head he says the air is stagnant in the room, but Tim has always been a good liar.


End file.
